Dragonfly came visit

While my girl was busy doing her revision for her 1st term exam last week, a dragonfly came inside the house and hopped on her finger and remained staying there for me to take photo.  My girls recalled a song "红青蜓" that they learned from school and started to sing. I am happy to hear them sing Chinese song which they hardly do..

They were fascinated with it,  It flew away to it's freedom not long after that.

At the time of electricity blackout

The electricity supply suddenly went off just after I parked my car in the garage.  I was just in time to close my auto gate. 

I couldn't be bother to look for the candles as I really do not know where it is. 

Not long after that Clet brought back our kids from their tekwondo class.  He found some candles (He remembered where he kept it) and lighted up 2 candles on the dinner table.  I captured the room environment with my phone and later noticed that it is gave a romantic feel right away, hence posted here. 

Bye bye to the hen and chicks

If you have read my last post on My Hen Laid Eggs, here is the follow up story.  After a few day of hatching, 9 eggs turned into 7 chicks, the other 2 eggs were not successfully hatched.  

We can not keep the hen and the chicks as Clet has arranged for the construction workers to come in to do some renovation on our backyard.  Our backyard is all mess up with holes for laying the ground beam foundations.  No place for the chicken anymore.

We are very happy that Clet's brother is willing to adopt our hen and chicks.  They live in the outskirt with his own land, it is more appropriate to rear chicken there.

我家母鸡生蛋了。 My hen laid eggs.

Clet told us that seems like our hen laid egg yesterday.  But he was unsure how many.  To allow the hen having more comfortable nest to hetch the eggs, Clet brought some dried grass home just now.  Upon checking on the nest there are a total of 9 eggs.  Our hen is very protective of her eggs just like a mother protecting her children.  She is very furious when our dog, Lucky,  barking at her when Clet put the dried grass into its nest.  We have to put Lucky to the front porch to calm her down.

Anyone knows how long does it take for a hen to hetch the eggs in order for the chicks to come out?

Good Neighbours

I must say we are blessed with good neighbours both left and right and the one right opposite too.

I am closer to our neighbour on the left, though I am always out of the house during the day, we always find the chance to chit chat and catch up a little over the fence whenever we happen to meet each other. 

These are some of the gestures of our caring neighbour :

1. They help us to switch on our garage light when the sun goes down so that our house is not in total darkness when we come back late in the evening.
2. When we are away for vacations, they help us to feed our dog, Lucky, by giving him food over the fence (most of the time leftover roasted lamb and bones as they are specialised in roast lamb business).
3. Occasionally they will pass a container of roasted lamb, fruits from the relative's farm for us.  They will hang it on the fence if they did not manage to meet us.
4. They will help to watch over our house when we are away for a few days.
5. They will bring back goodies and gifts for us whenever they travel abroad.  Not to mention Chinese New Year Celebration.
6. They will invite us over when they hold a party at home.

These goodies are from their trip to China last week.    

Crystal is very happy to see this mochi.  Unfortunately she is still suffering from stomach upset, have not totally recovered yet.  She has tasted a very nice ice cream mochi in the Philippines and she has been asking for a similar mochi.  

Manufactured Homes

Buying manufactured homes and park model homes from factory is something very rare in our country. Our houses are all built on sites. It is interesting to know that homes can be built in the factory and be delivered as per our requirements and needs in the United States. These homes are built in compliance with the building code set out by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and are also constructed to meet the standard guideline to its quality, durability, strength, transportability, and fire resistance.

At first I thought these manufactured homes are meant for temporary used, in actual fact the structure and design are very much for a long term residential used. Many factors that are required in a modern living like what they have today such as plumbing, electrical, air-conditioning & heating system are all being taken into consideration and can be in-built into the these homes. Extension can also be added to the existing construction of the homes as and when required in the future.

As the park model homes are all manufactured in the factory and deliver to the actual site for assembling, the noise and dust pollution in building homes can be eliminated at the actual building ground. I assume a lot of us would welcome the idea of having the homes built without having the noise, debris and dust around.

Everything that need in building a home can be picked and chose in the factory itself, it would be very interesting if we could find park model homes or manufactured homes factories in this part of the world.

No Internet Connection

It takes a week for our telephone line and internet connection to be transferred from our old home to our new home. We are still waiting for the Telekom man to come transferring our telephone line. Luckily I am able to access the internet in the office. I will have to maximise the time during my lunch break checking on my mails, update my blogs other online activities as much as I can.

Nowadays, Internet connection is an integral part of our lives, a lot of business activities can not be done without it, especially those with online businesses.

Our new home is still in a big mess, with boxes and boxes of stuff every way, Clet and his worker are moving stuff from our old home at the intervals of fixing the lights, doors and fencing this week. We are lost when looking for our stuff, Crystal has been wanting to start unpacking to look for her books, she loves reading, we just have to ask her to wait till her book shelve is ready. We only have that little time at night to do our unpacking and arranging to put our new home into a presentable and comfortable state. We have too much stuff organise I must say.

Update on our new home

We have moved. Officially we have moved on last Saturday, 07/05/2011.

Clet has put up an alter by the entrance for The Lord. In a prayer, we asked for His Blessings and presence in our new home to protect and shelter us at all times, and also thank Him for giving us a new home.

Since the workers were still around repairing the house, I prepared a light lunch for them who have been helping to repair the house for the past 1 month. They continued their tasks right away after their lunch. There are still lots of bits and pieces of everything needed to be touched up and fixed but we moved in anyway. Will have to get them fix up day by day.

Our girls are happy sharing a room, I heard them discussing who takes the big bed and who take the smaller bed and who sleeps near the window and so on, there were some disagreement at first but they sorted it out among themselves remarkably. I have noticed that their beds are nice and tidy in the morning before they go to school these 2 days...unlike last time, the bedroom was like a war zone. :D Girls, keep up the good work!!

more space for them to play

Helping out with house work

My girls are willing to help out with the laundry whenever I ask them to, though with lots of "intervals" before finishing their tasks, they always fold the laundry and put them away nicely in the respectively drawers.

I have to come around to check on the progress every now and then, I always find them reading books, checking on their computer game or playing with their toys, that's what I call the "intervals", I will have to get them back to finish up with their job again.

With additional part time assignment on hand, I really need their helps on some of the house chaos, as they are still small there are nothing much I can assign to them apart from training them to tidy up the house, keeping their closet neat, sweeping the floor occasionally and some other light tasks. We do anticipate more house chaos after we move into our double storey home next month. Their little helping hands would definitely help me a lot.

A way to say "Thank You"

This year we celebrated Pearl's birthday in a small way, in such a small way that only involved her small little friends in school. With the help of my SIL, a nice purple cake was baked the night before, saved me the worries of baking it myself.

We did not send any invitation out to inform the students' parents for the celebration. We thought since the kids will be in school on that day, we will just send in a birthday cake and goodies bags to have a small party during their morning tea break.

By the time we arrived the school, the teachers have already got the table set up and put a little birthday hat on for our little Pearl, all ready for the party. We brought in Crystal to join in the party too...she has to excuse herself from her class for a little while, obviously Pearl is very happy to have us around for her birthday in the school.

Besides receiving birthday presents from her form teachers, we were very surprise to see Pearl received presents from her classmates, not just one but two presents. We did not expect it so since no invitations were sent out to the parents. Since we don't normally have the chance to meet the parents, sending thank you notes to them would be the best way to appreciate their thoughtfulness.

I would prefer to have personalized thank you cards and thank you notes to express how thankful we are to receive those gifts which have given a much brighter smile on Pearl's face on her birthday. Kids and adults alike love to receive gifts, don't we?

Nowadays it is very convenient to get a personalized thank you card through the web. There a many different types of cards to choose from. Just type in the thank you notes in the card you have chosen and print it out. We could make it more personalized by uploading a photo from our computer too, having our photo on the cards would cost us dearly if it is to be printed by the shop. We could get it at a very reasonable price from the net nowadays.